But what if you don’t have a YouTube account or don’t want to login? Well that’s also easy, if you have the popular ad-blocking extension uBlock Origin installed (the link is to the addon’s Github site, but it should be available in the usual addon repositories for Firefox, Chrome, Chromium, and perhaps a couple of other browsers). All you need to do is this:

In the Addon manager (Firefox) or Extensions page (Chrome(ium)), click the button to go to the Preferences for the uBlock Origin addon, or click the Options link.

If a “Show Dashboard” button appears, click it.

Click on the “3rd-party filters” tab. Scroll to the bottom of the page, to the “Custom” section.

In the textbox you should see a line that looks like this (possibly the last line in the textbox:

! https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/yt_annoyances_other.txt

Uncomment this line by removing the exclamation point and space character from the start, so it looks like this:

https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/yt_annoyances_other.txt

Click the “Parse” button below the text box. Now, just above the textbox, you should see a new entry that says:

Don’t worry about the word “outdated”, this isn’t a filter that needs to be changed frequently. Now look for the “Apply Changes” button in the upper right hand corner of the page. Click it. The word “outdated” will change to a “purge cache” button. Don’t click that. Just close the tab or window. You’re done.

If you use AdBlock rather than uBlock Origin you might want to consider switching, because in my experience uBlock Origin is more effective in blocking ads and other annoyances. You can always switch back if you don’t think it’s a better blocker.